The Arrogance of Power (26 page)

Did Richard Nixon influence these developments, or were they just lucky breaks for Hughes? Dietrich, for one, found the IRS reversal on the Medical Institute ruling curious. “Did Howard get a bargain?” he asked. “. . . You can draw your own conclusions.” Hughes “was definitely not a philanthropist. . . . In the back of his mind, there was no question it was to put the vice president of the United States under his obligation.”
⁶

Even after the disaster of the 1956 loan, however, Nixon was unable to resist accepting financial favors from Hughes. It was a folly as great as that of President Clinton in the nineties, engaging in a silly sexual dalliance long after he had been pegged as a womanizer, and with the knowledge that his enemies saw his philandering as his Achilles' heel. Yet while Clinton survived the Monica Lewinsky affair, Nixon's lasting need for Hughes's money was to be a major factor in his downfall.

_____

“I, Richard Milhous Nixon, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States. . . .” In January 1957, as he again intoned the inauguration pledge to the American people, Nixon's promise to his wife not to run had been broken—for the first time but not the last. Since he had made it, their marriage had inexorably changed.

The Pat the public saw loyally continued to uphold the image of the devoted spouse. She accepted all the titles bestowed upon her: Outstanding Homemaker of the Year, Mother of the Year, the Nation's Ideal Wife. She indeed had been a rock, ever supportive, ever at Nixon's side. She took part in trivial activities without looking bored, shook a thousand hands, handed out ballpoint pens inscribed “Patricia Nixon.” She shared with the press absurd facts: that her campaign wardrobe consisted of five dresses, four suits, two pairs of shoes, and eight hats, but no briefcase, because she was only the wife. “She had the characteristics of a great actress,” Nixon told his daughter Julie years later, “being at her best when onstage.”

Privately Pat was ever more frustrated. “I would like to do part-time work,” she wrote her friend Helene Drown, “rather than all the useless gadding I am expected to do.” She let slip, at the 1956 convention, that she could think of “any number of things I prefer to politics.” Nixon was aware of her resentment and had even confided in Eisenhower that he had “a serious problem with his wife.” If Pat did not reconcile herself to staying in Washington, he told the president, “I will have difficulty in doing
anything.
”

Two years had passed since CBS's Robert Pierpoint, shocked at how remote Pat had grown, had seen in her a “deep-seated terror” of doing anything that might impede Nixon's ambitions. Now she began to lash back. Visitors
spoke of having witnessed Pat “blowing her stack,” and insiders commented on her “rare but furious temper.” Nixon's go-between with the FBI during the Hiss case, Father Cronin, had become his principal speechwriter in 1956. Once, when Nixon delivered a speech badly, Cronin recalled, “Pat chewed the hell out of him in front of the staff.

“One day,” Cronin said, “Dick sent me to his home in the suburbs to get some papers he needed in a hurry. I knew the family well, had been there to dinner, and liked the daughters. But when I knocked, Pat opened the door and said, ‘Oh no! He can't get back in by sending a priest!' I went back and said, ‘What did you get me into?' He said, ‘Oh, I didn't think she'd say anything to
you.
We're just having a little problem now.' But I noticed then that Nixon was not going home at night. He kept a hotel room in the District. . . . And he was just living there.”

It was probably during this period that—as Nixon's cousin Jessamyn West learned—Hannah Nixon flew across the continent to the rescue. She came not to be with her son but with Pat, who “wasn't speaking to him.”

“Pat is in one of her moods,” James Bassett told his wife in a letter home. “Nobody else in the U.S. would believe it.” Bassett observed the couple on the campaign plane. “They would always sit across the aisle from each other, or still further apart. Then, as the plane circled for landing, they would get together and put on their ‘Pat and Dick' smiles. He would put his arm around her for the photographers.”

In late 1956 Nixon returned from a trip to Europe with the suggestion that they adopt a refugee child. Pat refused.

Months later Bassett came upon Nixon, a senior cabinet colleague, and a bevy of six young women in a secluded Maryland restaurant. The colleague disappeared with one of the women. Nixon, who was very drunk, refused Bassett's offer to take him home. He said the girls would look after him.

Bassett thought Nixon looked on women as “a different species . . . an extra appendage,” that he had “a total scorn for female mentality.” Nixon had a repertoire of smutty jokes, and a favorite—one his staff knew well—concerned a stud who prevailed on his wife to have sex a dozen times a day. When at last she protested she was too tired for more, went the punch line, her sneering husband would call her “Deadass!” One morning on the campaign train, Bassett recalled, Nixon emerged from his compartment with Pat on their way to breakfast. Then, in front of aides, he looked at Pat “with a curious glint in his eye, and said: ‘Deadass!' ” No one laughed.

During that same 1956 campaign, Nixon's once-fierce father fell seriously ill. At seventy-five, suffering from kidney disease, arthritis, and bleeding ulcers, Frank Nixon sent word from Whittier that he wanted to see his son. Nixon was unable to go to California at first but, on a secretary's advice, managed a “Dear Dad” letter instead of his usual “Dear Mother and Dad.” Then, during the Republican convention, his father suffered a rupture of the abdominal artery and went downhill rapidly.

Fresh from his nomination for vice president, Nixon hurried to the dying man's bedside. “I shall always remember the last time I saw him,” he wrote years later. “He asked me to shave him, because he was too weak to do it himself. When I had finished, he said he felt better. I told him, ‘I will see you in the morning.' ‘I don't think I'll be here in the morning,' he replied. ‘Dad, you've got to keep fighting,' I said. His last words to me were, ‘Dick, you keep fighting.' The next day he died. . . .” During the deathwatch, Nixon's mother had welcomed sympathizers with a request they sign a visitors' book and inspect a square of red carpet on which her son had stood when he took the oath as vice president in 1953. He had sent it to her himself, she said. When Hannah let the press in, at her son's suggestion, Nixon told them she had risen at dawn to bake them apple pie.

Sitting with Nixon that weekend as his father suffered upstairs, Bassett thought his boss seemed oddly detached. “I could hear the strangled breathing, a crackling noise,” Bassett remembered. “It didn't seem to bother Dick, but it bothered me. He was busy planning his campaign. . . .”

After Frank Nixon died, on September 4, Nixon forbade photographers to take pictures of the grieving family at the funeral. This, he let it be known, was “strictly personal sorrow.” Within weeks, though, back on the stump, he was courting the sympathy vote without a qualm.

In Buffalo, New York, on October 16, Nixon opened his speech with “My father . . .” Then, after a catch of the breath as if to master his emotions, he continued: “I remember my father telling me a long time ago—‘Dick, Dick,' he said, ‘Buffalo is a beautiful town.' It may have been his
favorite
town!” Moving on to the city of Rochester, and then to Ithaca—three political rallies in twenty-four hours—Nixon reportedly began each speech with the same line about his father's “favorite town,” changing only the name of the city.

While in Ithaca, Nixon had exploded with rage after taking questions from Cornell University students on a television show. “Get me away from these little monsters!” he hissed to an aide, and rushed off the set. So upset was he that, back at the airport, he vomited at the edge of the runway before boarding the plane. Once airborne, he lost control completely, ranting in front of the press and threatening—it was a line he often used—to “cut off the balls” of the staff who had set up the program. “You son of a bitch!” Nixon shouted at Ted Rogers, the loyal TV aide who had masterminded his fund appearance four years earlier. “You put me on with those shitty-ass liberal sons of bitches; you tried to destroy me. . .!” He flung himself on Rogers and had to be pulled off by one of the reporters. During the same tour Nixon allegedly punched another man in the face.

Any political candidate is exhausted by the end of a campaign. Nixon, though, seemed abnormally disoriented. In Kentucky he kept referring to the time as “tonight” when it was early morning. Hours later, in Illinois, he thought he had just arrived from Texas. In Ohio, boarding a plane at a deserted airstrip, he turned to wave at a nonexistent crowd. James Reston noted in the
New York Times
that reporters had been “psychoanalyzing” Nixon since the convention.

Watching Nixon at the convention, Bob Haldeman had been shaken. “Before gray-colored draperies in a San Francisco hotel room,” he recalled, “Dick Nixon stood among a group of Republican delegates. I moved closer and listened in dismay. My first thought was that he had been drinking. His sentences were almost incoherent; his monologue rambled on circuitously while everyone around him looked at each other, wonderingly. . . .”

Slurred rambling was typical of Nixon when he was fatigued and stressed, whether he had been drinking or not. It worried Bassett, who by now knew Nixon very well indeed. “What scares the hell out of me,” he had told Nixon the night he ran amok after the Ithaca television show, “is that you would blow sky-high over a thing as inconsequential as this. What in God's name would you do if you were president and got into a really bad situation?”

Nixon said he would consider the question. It was just a few months since he had learned that Dr. Hutschnecker, his New York medical consultant, had decided to specialize solely in psychotherapy. The news had distressed him, because it meant that future appointments with the doctor might prove embarrassing. His meetings with Hutschnecker would now be less frequent and usually at a private location.

“I have a feeling,” Nixon had written to Bebe Rebozo as the campaign went into high gear, “that I might be applying for one of the famous Rebozo ‘rest cures' after the battle is over.” And so he did, heading down to Key Biscayne right after the election.

There was always Rebozo.

Does a man “enjoy” crises? . . . I find it especially difficult to answer the question.

—Richard Nixon, in 1962

B
y the summer of 1957 visitors to the Nixons' new home were shown a cornucopia of foreign wonders: pictorial scrolls from Japan on the living room wall, copper candelabra from Korea on the table. A third-century Buddha in Richard's study, courtesy of the king of Afghanistan. A teak chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl; “Madame Chiang Kai-shek gave it to me,” said Pat. A fine rug in the dining room, a gift from the shah of Iran, an early token of a generosity that would be extended for years to come. Two lacquer coffee tables from a land not yet familiar to Americans, named Vietnam.

The gifts, Pat told guests, were diplomatic tokens of esteem from forty nations. The number of countries would exceed fifty before the vice presidency ended, and by then the Nixons would have traveled twice around the world. They visited countries where no American president or vice president had set foot before. They were “superambassadors,” an idea conceived by Dwight Eisenhower.

“What are you doing this summer?” the president had asked in 1953, and then suggested a trip to the Far East. Nixon had accepted the task eagerly and took his mission seriously. Every stop of the journey was preceded by meticulous briefings, the record of every potentate on the route thoroughly analyzed. In each country diplomats were urged to get the vice president off the cocktail circuit and into meetings with ordinary citizens, ranging from businesspeople and intellectuals to laborers and peasant farmers.

Nixon was to recall that tour as his first step in gaining the foreign expertise that years later, when the rest of his reputation was squandered and gone, might enable him to claim the mantle of “great statesman.” It also presaged, in country after country, what many now consider Nixon's future policy errors and personal folly.

In Indonesia, Nixon and Pat banqueted—he would remember—“off gold plate to the light of a thousand torches, while musicians played on the shore of a lake covered with white lotus blossoms.” President Sukarno's gifts to Nixon included ivory ornaments embossed with the Kuwaiti coat of arms, perhaps received by the Indonesian president as presents from the Emir and then recycled to his American guest.

Nixon later said that Sukarno's “corrosive vanity” offended him, although his own concept of grandeur would one day raise eyebrows in his own country. The splendor of his escort's regalia on a visit to India would inspire him as president to order Ruritanian uniforms for the attendants at the White House. In India in 1953, Nixon got on neither with Prime Minister Nehru nor with his daughter, future Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Nehru's verdict, when Nixon followed a visit to Pakistan by endorsing U.S. military aide to the Pakistanis, was to call him “an unprincipled cad.” Nixon got on well, on the other hand, with the general soon to become leader of Pakistan, Ayub Khan.

Nixon's comments as president about Indira Gandhi were, as Henry Kissinger was to say, “not always printable.” He despised her, and he distrusted Indian policy statements. Nixon was to favor Pakistan in the 1971 war between India and Pakistan—even after a million Bengalis had been killed and more millions left homeless in a genocidal rampage by Pakistan's army. Before the war ended, he would consider using nuclear weapons in the event China and the Soviet Union were drawn into the conflict.

A vital underlying issue for Nixon in 1971 would be the opening to China, in which Pakistan was an intermediary. In 1953 the young Nixon had visited the Chinese Nationalist island of Taiwan, as the honored guest of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. He said then that Red China would not be recognized and encouraged the impression that the United States backed Chiang's hopes of reconquering the mainland. Soon, though, at a Christmas party in Washington, he would be heard to say, “Someday I'll go to China . . . mainland China.” Two decades later, the Chinese breakthrough was to be his undeniably fine achievement as president.

In 1953 Nixon also went to Iran, where he met the shah, His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Although he quickly became, in Nixon's words, a “personal friend,” Pahlavi is referred to only once and briefly in the Nixon memoirs. There is no mention of the fact that their meeting came within months of the shah's return to the throne with the assistance of Operation Ajax, a CIA-orchestrated coup designed to bring oil-rich Iran firmly under Western influence. Nor does Nixon discuss the way that following a personal visit as president, he would anoint the shah (a repressive ruler with a brutal
secret police) the guardian of Western interests in the entire region. Nixon armed the Kurds at the shah's request and gave the ruler extraordinary access to the latest U.S. weaponry, without prior consultation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the State Department. Former Undersecretary of State George Ball likened this to “giving the keys of the world's largest liquor store to a confirmed alcoholic.” The negative consequences are still reverberating today.

Least of all would the Nixon memoirs mention the extent of the shah's personal largess. Gifts to American leaders by foreign heads of state must by law be turned over to the government. After Nixon left office, at least a dozen such gifts from the shah were listed as “missing.” The shah also reportedly contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars—by one account more than one million dollars—to Nixon's 1972 campaign.

There is little in the memoirs about the Philippines, also on the 1953 itinerary, and not a single reference to the later president of the Philippines, the robber baron–dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos and his wife, Imelda—she of the myriad pairs of shoes—are variously reported to have contributed either $250,000 or $1 million to Nixon's political campaigns. Marcos's motive was simple. As historian and Nixon specialist Professor Stanley Kutler has said, he was “buying influence”—as was the shah.

There was a good reason, Nixon argued years later, for the United States to maintain alliances with such dictators. “Do you want communism out there?” he replied when asked about the relationships with the shah's Iran and Marcos's Philippines. “Those are authoritarian states, but they don't threaten their neighbors, and they are our friends. Totalitarian Communist states do threaten their neighbors and they are not our friends.”

The serious political business of the 1953 Nixon tour was to determine how best to stop the forward march of communism in Asia. Whatever their differences, Eisenhower and Nixon shared the belief that America could not be insular, that it was essential for it to contain hostile powers, and in the fifties that meant Communist powers. For Nixon, however, the effort involved more than simply containment. He had long been preaching that to avoid another world war and bring “peace and security in our time,” the United States had to “go on the offensive in the ideological struggle.” The battle with communism topped the agenda as Nixon's air force Constellation flew around Asia, to Korea—just starting to settle into the uneasy stalemate that passed for peace—to Malaya, to Laos, to Cambodia . . . and to Vietnam.

At that time, few Americans could have located Indochina on a map. The war being fought there was someone else's conflict, and few foresaw that the French colonial forces would soon go down to humiliating defeat at the hands of Ho Chi Minh's guerrillas. Nixon remembered sitting with Emperor Bao Dai in a grand villa north of Saigon, as “barefoot servants padded in noiselessly carrying silver trays laden with fresh fruit and cups of tea.” “If Vietnam is divided,” Bao Dai correctly prophesied, “we will eventually lose it all.”

On a field trip in northern Vietnam, dressed in battle fatigues and helmet, Nixon told French officers and Vietnamese conscripts that they were “fighting on the very outpost of freedom,” that the American people “supported their cause and honored their heroism.” He flew home believing that should the French leave Vietnam, it and its neighbors “would fall like husks before the Communist hurricane.” He uncritically accepted the domino theory, the theory that—fatally for thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese—would drive his nation's foreign policy far into the future.

Soon after Nixon's return to Washington, when America faced its first serious decision on Vietnam, he was a strong advocate of drastic action. Ten thousand crack French troops were cut off in a shrinking enclave at Dien Bien Phu, under the unrelenting attack of a large Communist force. With the United States funding 80 percent of the cost of the French war effort, and providing some two hundred advisers,
¹
Eisenhower came under pressure to use U.S. force to relieve the French force. “The boys,” he recalled, referring to his senior aides, “were putting the heat on me.” Lacking the support of Congress or of America's allies, however, the president did not intervene.

In April 1954, during a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Nixon was asked his opinion of what the United States should do if the French were to withdraw from Vietnam. He replied that the plight of the free world was desperate, and retreat in Asia unthinkable. He continued: “If in order to avoid it we must take the risk now by putting American boys in, I believe that the executive branch has to take the politically unpopular position of facing up to it and doing it, and I personally would support such a decision.”

With those words Richard Nixon had become one of the very first senior elected politicians, even possibly the first, to speak out in favor of putting American ground troops into Vietnam.

Although the remarks had been made on an off-the-record basis, the European press identified Nixon as their source. U.S. papers soon followed up with major headlines. Given the controversial line Nixon had taken and the fact that his audience has been made up of journalists, he could hardly have expected otherwise. Some assumed the vice president was floating a trial balloon on Eisenhower's behalf, to test public reaction. Yet the record suggests the comments reflected his own view. A letter written the next day by his aide James Bassett, moreover, shows Nixon came to him “wanting his hand held” after his “very forthright talk.” Nixon “knew this would cause an uproar,” Bassett told his wife, and “did it deliberately (as he told me on the phone just now) to ‘stir up some thinking. . . .' ” Nixon's talk of sending U.S. troops to Vietnam was “strictly his own baby.”

Behind the scenes Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Arthur Radford had suggested coming to the aid of the French with air strikes flown by U.S. bombers. The plan was designated Operation Vulture and included a special option, the use of three tactical nuclear weapons. Eisenhower's reaction to that
idea, he recalled, was: “You boys must be crazy. We can't use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God . . .” Nixon, and others, including Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who would later advocate bombing North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age,” supported the nuclear option.

As the days passed and a French defeat at Dien Bien Phu looked inevitable, Nixon talked on in private about the need for “inculcating some real
guts
into people.” Eisenhower continued to take a cooler view. “The sun's still shining,” he said at a White House meeting. “Dien Bien Phu isn't the end of the world . . . it's not that important.”

At Duke Zeibert's with James Bassett, during an evening of “vast hair-letting down” over liqueurs, Nixon argued that the best hope now was a Pacific alliance—“even without the laggard British”—and use of Nationalist Chinese troops if Red China made threats. “Then, by God, we'd have to employ the atom bomb. Mark my words. . . .”

After Dien Bien Phu had fallen, after Eisenhower had notified France that the United States would not intervene, and after Vietnam had been divided in two by the Geneva agreement, Nixon was one of those who continued to promote an invasion involving amphibious landings and ground troops. Eisenhower would later write that he had thought unilateral U.S. intervention “nothing less than sheer folly.” Seven years were to pass before John F. Kennedy was to commit thousands more “advisers” to South Vietnam, the first act in the protracted tragedy of America's Vietnam War, a war that Nixon would long support.

_____

Nixon continued to go out of his way meanwhile to show that he personally had “the guts” to face down Communists. His 1958 tour of Latin America, billed as a goodwill mission, nearly cost him his life. The plan called for him to visit eight countries, with Pat at his side, at a time of growing agitation encouraged by Moscow. After a decade of tilting at the idea of communism in the United States, Nixon would now have to deal with the real thing.

At first, in Uruguay, he faced nothing worse than student heckling, signs reading
FUERA NIXON
! (“Get out, Nixon!”) and
IMPERIALIST
! and claims that he was a warmonger and friend of dictators. Then, after he had trumped the protesters by debating the issues and—in Alfredo Stroessner's Paraguay—calling for political freedom, Communist leaders elsewhere decided to be confrontational.

Warned that demonstrators intended to prevent him from visiting Lima's San Marcos University, Nixon decided to meet them head on. Accompanied only by his interpreter and lead Secret Service agent, he left his car and advanced on a throng of two thousand angry students. “I would like to talk to you,” he shouted. Then, over the roar of abuse that encountered him, he asked, “Why are you afraid of the truth?” Rocks began flying, one breaking one of
the Secret Service men's teeth and glancing off Nixon's shoulder. When they retreated to their open car, Nixon stood up, hands over his head like a victorious prizefighter, shouting, “Cowards! . . . You are the worst kind of cowards!” as the vehicle pulled away.